Page:Barbarous Mexico.djvu/257

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CRITICS AND CORROBORATION
225

phleteers besides Mr. Cooper, too, who rushed to the defense of Mexico. One was Mr. E. S. Smith of Tippecanoe, Iowa, the man who wired President Taft begging him to deny The American Magazine the mails, and that before my first article went to press. Mr. Smith wrote "The Truth About Mexico," which The Bankers' Magazine printed, and the same matter was afterwards put into a pamphlet. Mr. Smith was so extravagant in his denials of imperfections in Mexican institutions and so glowing in his descriptions of Mexico's "ideal" government that one of that government's warmest defenders. The Mexican Herald, was revolted by the production and printed a long editorial in which it prayed that Mexico might be delivered of such friends as Mr. Smith.

Mr. Guillermo Hall, another American who is interested in Mexican properites, considers my articles a "great injustice," inasmuch as, since the poor Mexican knows nothing of freedom, he must be perfectly well off as a slave. The Tucson, Arizona, Citizen quoted Mr. Hall as follows:

"The cold facts stated in black type might seem preposterous to the Americans of this country, whose training and environment are so different. *** In the lower country along the border, for instance, the so-called peon has no conception of the liberty we enjoy in America. He absolutely doesn't know what it means. The property owners there are compelled by force of circumstances to maintain, at present, a sort of feudalism over him."

Mr. Dwight E. Woodbridge, a planter and writer, wrote at length in defense of Mexican slavery in the Mining World, the organ of the American Mine Owners organization. Here are some excerpts:

"Unquestionably there are brutalities and savageness in Mexico. Outrages are committed there, both on the prisoners